FaceTime Communications Inc has become the first company to license America Online Inc’s Instant Messenger technololgy, in a deal expected to be announced today (Monday). The license, for which FaceTime paid an undisclosed sum, gets the company access to AOL’s network of 45 million registered IM users. FaceTime uses instant messaging technology for its customer support applications. The deal could be the first of a number of similar deals from AOL, which continues to block other access to its instant messaging services from rival Microsoft Corp and AT&T Co systems.
According to David Hsieh of FaceTime, the company took out the license partly to ensure continued access to the AOL network, and partly to gain an inroad to AOL’s 1,000-plus ecommerce partners as potential customers. In theory, AOL could have blocked access to FaceTime customers using IM for support, just as it’s done with Microsoft’s MSN Messaging Service and Tribal Voice Inc’s PowWow, as used by AT&T. Hsieh, who commented that hacking into a competitive network is the wrong way to do this said that Foster City, California-based FaceTime was paying for a protocol license so it can integrate IM into its software and access the network traffic. AOL won’t actively sell the FaceTime products to its e-commerce partners, but will refer the technology on.
The deal isn’t exlusive for either party, and Hsieh said that FaceTime remains agnostic about which IM system its customers use. He said the company was likely to strike up similar arrangements with other IM providers. Similarly, Hsieh thinks it likely that AOL will license its technology to other vendors. Lots of people have commented that AOL hasn’t so far had a business model to support its freely available service and software. This gives them a business model.
On Monday FaceTime will also launch version 3.0 of its FaceTime Message Exchange product, nine months after the initial version came out. The new version, currently in beta but likely to be generally available by the end of the month, adds business intelligence tools, a customer supportal personalized access system, and a customer profile system for information and conversation logging.
